August 2009

August 31, 2009

TAPPED Archive | The American Prospect: have a lot of friends who spent a great deal of money, and went into a lot of debt, to learn how to be professional broadcast journalists. They are now struggling to find work in a profession that is -- to put it bluntly -- contracting. So when I first heard that Jenna Bush Hager, the former President's daughter, was getting a job with The Today Show, I wondered what her qualifications were.

Hager, a 27-year-old teacher in Baltimore, said she has always wanted to be a teacher and a writer, and has already authored two books. But she was intrigued by the idea of getting into television when Bell contacted her.

Oh. She "always wanted to be a teacher," and was "intrigued" by television, so I guess that qualifies her to be an education reporter over all those journalists with actual experience and education who are struggling to find jobs.

As Glenn Greenwald writes, there's unlikely to be any outrage on the right over Hager getting a job she's manifestly unqualified for simply because she's the former President's daughter, despite right-wing affectations toward "meritocracy." There's something revealing here about the right's attitude towards those who succeed despite not being privileged -- the only way they can make sense of someone like Sonia Sotomayor rising to excellence from modest beginnings is through "preferential treatment," because what does it say about their own privilege, intelligence, or ability if that's not the case?

Last week, Greg Mankiw wrote a post casually asserting that people with "good genes" make lots of money and pass their intelligence off to their kids who then get high SAT scores. John Sides and Brad DeLong demolished Mankiw's argument, but I think Mankiw's assumption is informative here: The right doesn't mind privilege being retained, by whatever means, within those groups that already have it, because it proves their theories about meritocracy. But when someone like Sonia Sotomayor goes from the South Bronx to Princeton valedictorian to the Supreme Court, it forces the question of how much people of privilege depend on their circumstances -- their financial and social advantages -- to succeed rather than their ability or intelligence. That's uncomfortable for some people to think about, and it's part of why Sonia Sotomayor provokes outrage over "merit," while glaring examples of preferential treatment for the privileged do not.

August 30, 2009

Why I Am Anti-Republican: I got an e-mail from a prominent Republican asking why I am so anti-Republican these days. Since many of my friends ask the same thing I thought I would share my reply:

I think the party got seriously on the wrong track during the George W. Bush years, as I explained in my Impostor book. In my opinion, it no longer bears any resemblance to the party of Ronald Reagan. I still consider myself to be a Reaganite. But I don’t see any others anywhere in the GOP these days, which is why I consider myself to be an independent. Mindless partisanship has replaced principled conservatism. What passes for principle in the party these days is “what can we do to screw the Democrats today.” How else can you explain things like that insane op-ed Michael Steele had in the Washington Post on Monday?

I am not alone. When I talk to old timers from the Reagan years, many express the same concerns I have. But they all work for Republican-oriented think tanks like AEI and Hoover and don’t wish to be fired like I was from NCPA . Or they just don’t want to be bothered or lose friends. As a free agent I am able to say what they can’t or won’t say publicly.

I think the Republican Party is in the same boat the Democrats were in in the early eighties — dominated by extremists unable to see how badly their party was alienating moderates and independents. The party’s adults formed the Democratic Leadership Council to push the party back to the center and it was very successful. But there is no group like that for Republicans. That has left lunatics like Glenn Beck as the party’s de facto leaders. As long as that remains the case, I want nothing to do with the GOP.

I will know that the party is on the path to recovery when someone in a position of influence reaches out to former Republicans like me. We are the most likely group among independents to vote Republican. But I see no effort to do so. All I see is pandering to the party’s crazies like the birthers . In the short run that may be enough to pick up a few congressional seats next year, but I see no way a Republican can retake the White House for the foreseeable future. Both CBO and OMB are predicting better than 4% real growth in 2011 and 2012. If those numbers are even remotely correct Obama will have it in the bag. Also, Republicans have to find a way to win some minority votes because it is not viable as a whites-only party in presidential elections. That’s why I wrote my Wrong on Race book, which no one read.

August 29, 2009

Five Myths About Health Care in the Rest of the World: As Americans search for the cure to what ails our health-care system, we've overlooked an invaluable source of ideas and solutions: the rest of the world. All the other industrialized democracies have faced problems like ours, yet they've found ways to cover everybody -- and still spend far less than we do.

I've traveled the world from Oslo to Osaka to see how other developed democracies provide health care. Instead of dismissing these models as "socialist," we could adapt their solutions to fix our problems. To do that, we first have to dispel a few myths about health care abroad:

It's all socialized medicine out there.

Not so. Some countries, such as Britain, New Zealand and Cuba, do provide health care in government hospitals, with the government paying the bills. Others -- for instance, Canada and Taiwan -- rely on private-sector providers, paid for by government-run insurance. But many wealthy countries -- including Germany, the Netherlands, Japan and Switzerland -- provide universal coverage using private doctors, private hospitals and private insurance plans.

In some ways, health care is less "socialized" overseas than in the United States. Almost all Americans sign up for government insurance (Medicare) at age 65. In Germany, Switzerland and the Netherlands, seniors stick with private insurance plans for life. Meanwhile, the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs is one of the planet's purest examples of government-run health care.

Overseas, care is rationed through limited choices or long lines.

Generally, no. Germans can sign up for any of the nation's 200 private health insurance plans -- a broader choice than any American has. If a German doesn't like her insurance company, she can switch to another, with no increase in premium. The Swiss, too, can choose any insurance plan in the country.

In France and Japan, you don't get a choice of insurance provider; you have to use the one designated for your company or your industry. But patients can go to any doctor, any hospital, any traditional healer. There are no U.S.-style limits such as "in-network" lists of doctors or "pre-authorization" for surgery. You pick any doctor, you get treatment -- and insurance has to pay.

Canadians have their choice of providers. In Austria and Germany, if a doctor diagnoses a person as "stressed," medical insurance pays for weekends at a health spa.

As for those notorious waiting lists, some countries are indeed plagued by them. Canada makes patients wait weeks or months for nonemergency care, as a way to keep costs down. But studies by the Commonwealth Fund and others report that many nations -- Germany, Britain, Austria -- outperform the United States on measures such as waiting times for appointments and for elective surgeries.

In Japan, waiting times are so short that most patients don't bother to make an appointment. One Thursday morning in Tokyo, I called the prestigious orthopedic clinic at Keio University Hospital to schedule a consultation about my aching shoulder. "Why don't you just drop by?" the receptionist said. That same afternoon, I was in the surgeon's office. Dr. Nakamichi recommended an operation. "When could we do it?" I asked. The doctor checked his computer and said, "Tomorrow would be pretty difficult. Perhaps some day next week?"

Foreign health-care systems are inefficient, bloated bureaucracies.

Much less so than here. It may seem to Americans that U.S.-style free enterprise -- private-sector, for-profit health insurance -- is naturally the most cost-effective way to pay for health care. But in fact, all the other payment systems are more efficient than ours.

U.S. health insurance companies have the highest administrative costs in the world; they spend roughly 20 cents of every dollar for nonmedical costs, such as paperwork, reviewing claims and marketing. France's health insurance industry, in contrast, covers everybody and spends about 4 percent on administration. Canada's universal insurance system, run by government bureaucrats, spends 6 percent on administration. In Taiwan, a leaner version of the Canadian model has administrative costs of 1.5 percent; one year, this figure ballooned to 2 percent, and the opposition parties savaged the government for wasting money.

The world champion at controlling medical costs is Japan, even though its aging population is a profligate consumer of medical care. On average, the Japanese go to the doctor 15 times a year, three times the U.S. rate. They have twice as many MRI scans and X-rays. Quality is high; life expectancy and recovery rates for major diseases are better than in the United States. And yet Japan spends about $3,400 per person annually on health care; the United States spends more than $7,000.

Cost controls stifle innovation.

False. The United States is home to groundbreaking medical research, but so are other countries with much lower cost structures. Any American who's had a hip or knee replacement is standing on French innovation. Deep-brain stimulation to treat depression is a Canadian breakthrough. Many of the wonder drugs promoted endlessly on American television, including Viagra, come from British, Swiss or Japanese labs.

Overseas, strict cost controls actually drive innovation. In the United States, an MRI scan of the neck region costs about $1,500. In Japan, the identical scan costs $98. Under the pressure of cost controls, Japanese researchers found ways to perform the same diagnostic technique for one-fifteenth the American price. (And Japanese labs still make a profit.)

Health insurance has to be cruel.

Not really. American health insurance companies routinely reject applicants with a "preexisting condition" -- precisely the people most likely to need the insurers' service. They employ armies of adjusters to deny claims. If a customer is hit by a truck and faces big medical bills, the insurer's "rescission department" digs through the records looking for grounds to cancel the policy, often while the victim is still in the hospital. The companies say they have to do this stuff to survive in a tough business.

Foreign health insurance companies, in contrast, must accept all applicants, and they can't cancel as long as you pay your premiums. The plans are required to pay any claim submitted by a doctor or hospital (or health spa), usually within tight time limits. The big Swiss insurer Groupe Mutuel promises to pay all claims within five days. "Our customers love it," the group's chief executive told me. The corollary is that everyone is mandated to buy insurance, to give the plans an adequate pool of rate-payers.

The key difference is that foreign health insurance plans exist only to pay people's medical bills, not to make a profit. The United States is the only developed country that lets insurance companies profit from basic health coverage.

In many ways, foreign health-care models are not really "foreign" to America, because our crazy-quilt health-care system uses elements of all of them. For Native Americans or veterans, we're Britain: The government provides health care, funding it through general taxes, and patients get no bills. For people who get insurance through their jobs, we're Germany: Premiums are split between workers and employers, and private insurance plans pay private doctors and hospitals. For people over 65, we're Canada: Everyone pays premiums for an insurance plan run by the government, and the public plan pays private doctors and hospitals according to a set fee schedule. And for the tens of millions without insurance coverage, we're Burundi or Burma: In the world's poor nations, sick people pay out of pocket for medical care; those who can't pay stay sick or die.

This fragmentation is another reason that we spend more than anybody else and still leave millions without coverage. All the other developed countries have settled on one model for health-care delivery and finance; we've blended them all into a costly, confusing bureaucratic mess.

Which, in turn, punctures the most persistent myth of all: that America has "the finest health care" in the world. We don't. In terms of results, almost all advanced countries have better national health statistics than the United States does. In terms of finance, we force 700,000 Americans into bankruptcy each year because of medical bills. In France, the number of medical bankruptcies is zero. Britain: zero. Japan: zero. Germany: zero.

Given our remarkable medical assets -- the best-educated doctors and nurses, the most advanced hospitals, world-class research -- the United States could be, and should be, the best in the world. To get there, though, we have to be willing to learn some lessons about health-care administration from the other industrialized democracies.

To recap, Posner attacked CEA Chair Christina Romer for being too optimistic about the effects that fiscal stimulus had on second-quarter growth. According to Romer, the better performance of the economy in Q2 relative to Q1 was largely attributable to the economic stimulus. But Posner argues that $100 billion in stimulus spending in that quarter is simply too small relative to the size of the economy to make much of a difference. Throw in accusations of unethical or irresponsible behavior, and you have yourself an academic brouhaha.

But the error was Posner’s. As it turned out, he was comparing apples and oranges. Actually, he was comparing a quarter of an apple with a whole apple: by contrasting the amount of stimulus spending in one quarter with an annual measure of gross domestic product, he understated the relative size of the stimulus by a factor of four. He then multiplied his error by comparing it with the change in an annualized growth rate, which overstates the change in quarterly GDP growth by a factor of four. Yes, he was right that his numbers suggested the stimulus was too small to make this much of a difference. But that’s because his numbers understated the relative size of the stimulus by a factor of four and overstated the claimed consequences by a factor of four. And so Posner was wrong by a factor of sixteen. (See if you can spot his correction or apology in his follow-up.)

But now Posner is back, talking about “Christina Romer’s More Than $300 Billion Mistake.” That $300 billion? Beyond stating that number in a headline, he never returns to it, so we don’t know if it’s a typo or a calculation. But reading the full piece, it becomes clear that his real target is that we’ve all been wrong in taking Romer at her word that in Q2 around $100 billion of the stimulus money went out the door. Posner now thinks that it was “too high.” To cut through some confusion, note that this reflects that $60 billion is direct government spending and $40 billion comes in tax reductions. But Posner says:

The figure of $60 billion of [sic] $61 billion is too high. According to recovery.gov, the $61 billion figure is as of last week — seven weeks after the end of the second quarter … the number for the second quarter is undoubtedly significantly lower.
You can see the data from recovery.gov, here.

The chart plainly shows that seven weeks after the end of Q2, $84.6 billion had been paid out, not $61 billion. But Romer’s claims are about the quarter that ended on June 30, and while I don’t have data for precisely that day (although I’m sure Romer does), you can extrapolate the green line backwards. By July 17, $67.4 billion had been spent, and it looks like about $3 to $4 billion per week is being spent. Extrapolating backwards two to three weeks to June 30, the total was probably right around, ummm … $60 billion.

And the other $40 billion? As Menzie Chinn rightly notes, Posner doesn’t think that taxpayers have received it, but he doesn’t say why.

I’m glad that there are folks who are going to monitor the claims of government economists closely, but unfortunately Posner has generated more heat than light. John Maynard Keynes reportedly said, “When the facts change, I change my mind.” My advice to Posner: when your understanding of the facts change, don’t keep attacking the facts, change your mind.

The “Menaissance” and Its Dickscontents: This City Journal piece by Kay Hymowitz perfectly exemplifies a time-honored form of conservative argument. It goes something like this: liberal equality is just too confusing!

I think I first saw this kind of argument clearly laid out in Tocqueville. If I remember correctly, he noted that there is a kind of soothing clarity in stratified societies with brightly marked class lines. When classes are stable over generations, and there is little mobility up or down, conventions that govern class relations become settled, making it easy to know how to behave toward those above and below one’s station. Moreover, when classes are fixed and mobility is limited, there is little anxiety about improving one’s position, since there’s so little prospect for doing so. American-style democratic equality creates a pattern of unceasingly stressful striving for relative rank, and all this mobility up and down produces a confusion in manners that can lead to dangerous social frictions and resentments. It becomes too hard to know what to expect of others, or what others expect from us.

This is, as far as I can tell, Hymowitz’s argument about gender relations in the post-feminist era. Women attaining something like social equality with men has created not so much liberation as a kind of toxic confusion. When women are free to be individuals, free to want different things than other women, men can’t be sure what any particular women might want from him. To open the door for her or not!? To pick up the check or not!? To be a nice guy like she says she wants or a bad boy like she really wants?! These unresolved and unresolvable questions has led inevitably to the contemporary condition in which men are either unlovable whining sad sacks or misogynist assholes who cite a cartoon version of Darwinism to justify treating a woman as little more than an upgrade from Jergens and a sock. If we don’t like it, we only have feminism to blame. Or something like that.

Look, the phenomenon Hymowitz describes is real enough. Rapid social change inevitably makes it harder to coordinate expectations. If it is a change worth having, then the pains of adjustment are worth it. Period. That doesn’t mean those pains are unimportant. Guys do suffer uncertainty about whether or not to open doors or pick up checks. It really can be frustrating for the sensitive guy to find out he’d be more generally attractive if he learned to be a bit more of a dick.

But annoyances and disappointments suffered in the process of realizing fundamental conditions of a decent society don’t call into question the desirability of those conditions. All this vexation is a very, very small price to pay for equality. For men, it is a very, very small price to pay for the opportunity to share a life with a peer, a full partner, rather than with a woman limited by convention and straitened opportunity to a more circumscribed and subordinate role in life. Sexual equality has created the possibility of greater exactness and complementarity in matching women to men. That is, in my book, a huge gain to men. But equality does raise expectations for love and marriage. The prospect of finding a true partner, rather than someone to satisfactorily perform the generic role of husband or wife, leaves many of us single and searching for a good long time. But this isn’t about delaying adulthood, it’s about meeting higher standards for what marriage and family should be.

I think Hymowitz’s story gives too small a part to resentment at the loss of male privilege. Many men aren’t angry and confused because they don’t know what women want. They’re angry because they want what their fathers or grandfathers had, and they can’t get it. They’re confused because they can’t quite grasp why not. I think part of the fascination for many white guys with the show Mad Men is that it is a window into an attractive (to them) world of white male dominance and privilege that has largely disappeared. It is still possible to create a traditional patriarchal household, but it’s harder than ever for men to find women who will happily play along. And, in any case, there is little assurance of the stability of this sort of arrangement, since the social esteem that was once accorded to it — which helped reinforce men’s and women’s confidence in their traditional roles within it — has largely dissipated.

To my mind, too little attention has been paid to reconsidering ideals of manhood in the age of equality. Since I was a teenager, I’ve found old-school machismo pathetic and somehow irrelevant to the problem of becoming a man. Without even knowing what or why it was, I was heavily influenced by gay culture, which provided me, and many other straight young men, a wide variety of templates for manhood that are at once unmistakably masculine, playfully ironic, aesthetic, emotionally open, and happily sexual. You can be manly and care about shoes!!! I’ll confess that I used to periodically regret my heterosexuality because there seemed to be greater scope for constructing a distinctive and satisfying male identity within gay culture. I think that’s telling. And the virulent homophobia that remains in most American dude subcultures has cut most young men off from the possibility of modeling their manhood after any of the delightful variety of types available to the homophile. And that really doesn’t leave them with much to work with. Most Americans these days seem happy enough to see women succeed as high-achieving go-getters. And who doesn’t love Tim Gunn? But most of us have not yet given up on oppressively restrictive, strongly normative conceptions of hetero masculinity. That, I submit, is what stands in the way of a real, um … renaissance for men.

TAPPED Archive | The American Prospect: National Review Defends Its Segregationist Roots. You'd think that National Review would be trying to put things like its proud advocacy of white supremacy during the Civil Rights Movement to rest, but Fred Schwartz wants you to know that William F. Buckley was right, dammit:

Anyone who knows what “states’ rights” meant in 1964 must shudder at those words; but in retrospect, Goldwater and the editors had at least half a point. When the bill was debated in the Senate, opponents charged that it would require employers and educational institutions to meet rigid racial quotas in hiring and admissions. Nonsense, said the bill’s sponsors (and fully believed what they said). Nowhere did the bill mention quotas; in fact, it repeatedly and explicitly required equal treatment regardless of race. What could be plainer than that? And yet less than a decade later, “affirmative action” became all but mandatory.

Schwartz goes on to complain about other "big government" conservative bugaboos, like the Voting Rights Act, and then ties Affirmative Action, the VRA and environmental regulation to health care, presumably because health care reform is another big government initiative that might help the coloreds--and on that, as Schwartz might say, there is "half a point"--I just don't know why that's a problem. It's embarrassing that fifty years after segregation was outlawed conservatism's "flagship publication" is still basing its opposition to "big government" partially on whether or not the proposed legislation assists nonwhites. It's how the National Review can oppose the very concept of universal health care coverage and still support as terrible a violation of personal liberty and democratic principles as torture--like state sanctioned segregation, big government is all good as long as its aimed at putting a cultural other in their place.

Schwartz's pathetic attempt to turn Buckley's flagrant embrace of white supremacy into some kind of abstracy policy argument shouldn't be ignored either. This is what Buckley wrote:

The central question that emerges . . . is whether the White community in the South is entitled to take such measures as are necessary to prevail, politically and culturally, in areas in which it does not prevail numerically? The sobering answer is Yes – the White community is so entitled because, for the time being, it is the advanced race. It is not easy, and it is unpleasant, to adduce statistics evidencing the cultural superiority of White over Negro: but it is a fact that obtrudes, one that cannot be hidden by ever-so-busy egalitarians and anthropologists.

[...]

National Review believes that the South's premises are correct. It is more important for the community, anywhere in the world, to affirm and live by civilized standards, than to bow to the demands of the numerical majority. Sometimes it becomes impossible to assert the will of a minority, in which case it must give way, and the society will regress; sometimes the numerical minority cannot prevail except by violence: then it must determine whether the prevalence of its will is worth the terrible price of violence.

Regardless of what was being "debated in the Senate," Buckley's support of segregation wasn't based on a fear that big government policies would infringe on personal liberty--the editorial was arguing against black suffrage. The point was that whites were "the advanced race" and therefore entitled to dominate their betters--even to the point of denying blacks the right to vote.

August 28, 2009

The burden of debt: I respect Jim Hamilton a lot, so I take his criticism seriously — and he raises questions that others raise too about my relatively sanguine assessment of the debt situation. Yet I think that he and others are quite wrong, on several counts.
First off: the assertion that the post-World War II debt was sui generis, that it offers no guidance on what we can afford. It’s true that right after the war it was possible to get a drastic reduction in spending easily, since we didn’t have to fight the Axis any more. But let’s take a slightly later start date: in 1950, federal debt in the hands of the public was 80 percent of GDP, which is in the ballpark of what we’re looking at for 2019. By 1960 it was down to 46 percent — and I haven’t heard that anyone considered America a debt-crippled nation when JFK took office.
So how was that possible? Was it through drastic cuts in defense spending? On the contrary: we’re talking about the height of the Cold War (with a hot war in Korea along the way), and federal spending actually rose as a share of GDP. So yes, it wasn’t entitlement programs, but it wasn’t exactly discretionary either.
How, then, did America pay down its debt? Actually, it didn’t: federal debt rose from $219 billion in 1950 to $237 billion in 1960. But the economy grew, so the ratio of debt to GDP fell, and everything worked out fiscally.
Which brings me to a question a number of people have raised: maybe we can pay the interest, but what about repaying the principal? Jim gets scary numbers about the debt burden by assuming that we’ll have to pay off the debt in 10 years. But why would we have to do that? Again, the lesson of the 1950s — or, if you like, the lesson of Belgium and Italy, which brought their debt-GDP ratios down from early 90s levels — is that you need to stabilize debt, not pay it off; economic growth will do the rest. In fact, I’d argue, all you really need to do is stabilize debt in real terms.
So where Jim Hamilton has us paying $1 trillion a year to service $9 trillion in debt, I have us paying $225 billion — 2.5% real interest on that sum.
Now, how does that compare with the tax base? Hamilton rather mysteriously compares debt service only with current personal income taxes. If we use the overall tax take, and talk about what that tax take will be a decade from now, things look much less severe.
So: in 2008, with revenues already depressed by the recession and housing bust, the federal government took in $2.5 trillion in revenues. If we assume 2.5% real growth* and 2% inflation, by 2019 that would rise to $4 trillion. So debt service costs due to the next decade’s deficits would be less than 6 percent of revenue under current law.
So, to review: to make the debt look scary, you have to dismiss the post-World -War II experience, even though it turns out that the 50s offer a quite good lesson; assume that in the future the federal government will have to amortize debt over a quite short period, even though it never had to in the past; compare this inflated debt burden with a narrow piece of the federal tax base; and ignore the likely growth in the tax base over the next decade.
I’m not convinced.
*Contrary to what some think, we’d actually expect growth over the next decade to be somewhat above trend, as the economy picks up some of the current slack. That’s what the historical record tells us actually happens.
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August 27, 2009

Tor Editor Patrick Nielsen Hayden On the Future of SF Books - Publishing - io9: One thing I'm sure of is that we're going to be in linear immersive narratives that produce the reading trance. We won't be moving towards a "choose your own adventure" thing. People will do those things, but those are different art forms. There's something about immersive text that you can read in order - it's persisted through many technological changes. This fiction stuff works pretty well. It's been around a long time...

I do think immersive fictional texts will continue but it's obvious already that there's competition for people's time. Our competition at Tor Books is BoingBoing or Salon. There's more text online in a week than you could ever process in your life. It puts people into a hyperconsumptive, hungry-for-text state...

[W]ith fanfic, there's no ceiling on how great it can be because it's unlicensed and can't get published. It's often written far better than the stuff it's based on. I wish [fanfic could go legit]. For most of human history, remixing narratives in circulation has been how culture worked. I believe in compensating artists, but yesterday [on a panel at WorldCon] the "moral rights" thing came up, and I think that's horseshit. I think artists should be treated well and so should waitresses and plumbers. Artists shouldn't have "treat them extra nice" rules. People experience art socially. People say "Watch this! Read this!" We experience art and we want to talk about it. I know that there are writers horrified by fanfic. Jo Walton hates fanfic. But in general I think with TV and the mass media world, somebody is going to figure out a way to encourage [fanfic] in a way that makes them a pile of money...

Think Again: Official Evidence vs. “Gut Hatred”: Following the report that former Homeland Security Chief Tom Ridge has admitted that he was pressured by members of the Bush administration to raise the national threat level just before the 2004 election in what he understood to be a purely political move, political ace Marc Ambinder of The Atlantic Monthly wrote a column in which he admitted that the journalists who credulously reported these alerts had erred. But Ambinder added in their (and his own) defense that “Our skepticism about the activists’ conclusions [that the alerts were politically motivated] was warranted because these folks based their assumption on gut hatred for President Bush, and not on any evaluation of the raw intelligence.”

The sentence inspired blogosphere outrage on many levels simultaneously. First, and most egregiously, it attributed motives—“gut hatred”—to individuals without any evidence. Second, it attributed these suspicions only to “activists” as if it was not shared by anyone outside this small and (hateful) circle. Third, it treated opposition to George W. Bush—now roundly recognized to be perhaps America’s worst president ever—as a kind of irrational emotional disorder rather than a considered (and patriotically inspired) understanding of the consequences of his presidency in order to dismiss them out of hand. And finally, in doing all of these things, Ambinder paved the way for such views to be dismissed again without consideration of the respective accuracy. Liberals and other non-right-wingers have been hearing this now for more than five years: “Yes, you were right about:”

9/11-related failures of intelligence and action.

The failed capture of Osama bin Laden.

The failure to defeat of the Taliban.

The failed invasion of Iraq.

The use of torture.

The abuse of wire-tapping powers.

The politicization of the judiciary.

The gutting of the Constitution.

The ruinous effect of tax cuts.

The failure of enrich-the-rich economic policies.

The failure to address of the threat of global warming.

Etc, etc.

As one of Glenn Greenwald’s commenters smartly sums up the syndrome he calls “The Maturation Cycle of Bush Administration Scandals:”

But never mind about any of that, Ambinder clearly implied. You see, liberals, you were merely motivated by “gut hatred” rather than the kind of reasoned analysis that led so many in the punditocracy to offer what frequently amounted to blind trust in the wisdom and veracity of Bush administration actions.

(For more, see these posts by Thoreau, Brad Delong, and here, and Paul Krugman.)

To Ambinder’s credit, he read the criticism, admitted his error, and apologized. (And it wasn’t the kind of apology my spouse often gets: “I’m sorry that you feel that way.”) He wrote, “My hindsight bias is no less offensive than the bias I attribute to these liberals. It was wrong to use the phrase ‘gut hatred.’ Had I spent more time thinking about the post, I would have chosen a different phrase. And I should have.”

But Marcy Wheeler of FireDoglake, who, together with Salon’s Glenn Greenwald, appears to have inspired Ambinder’s second thoughts, found the argument in his apology almost as offensive as the original post. She flags the fact that Ambinder’s assessment “then—and now—of the threat levels is that he resorts to ‘official’ sources, raw intelligence, and representations from the players after the fact. But he still doesn't engage with the set of data that we DFHs [‘Dirty F-ing Hippies’] used to correctly interpret the threat assessments as politicized—the sheer number of elevated threat assessments, the timing of them, the absurdity of ‘threats’ that were treated as valid.”

What’s more, she continues, Ambinder “reifies ‘official’ sources both to the exclusion of a whole bunch of other evidence and in such a way that limits his ability to at least publicly challenge the credibility of those official sources based on their past record. These official sources are filtered—both through the natural egotistical self-promotion and by the conditions (such as torture) that underlie them.”

I published a lengthy book about the implications of presidential lying—including George W. Bush’s lying—before these events took place and it did not exactly tax my resources or researching abilities to come up with clear examples where Bush and top administration officials were routinely proven to have purposely misled Congress, the press, and the country. Indeed, with regard to these threat levels, there was ample evidence of manipulation, as Dan Froomkin demonstrated at the time. And Juan Cole at Informed Comment argued in the summer of 2004 that when Ridge did raise the terrorism alert, it led to the outing of an Al Qaeda double agent working with the Pakistani government to set a trap for Al Qaeda in the United Kingdom.

Meanwhile, what was the reaction when anyone questioned the wisdom, perspicacity, and honesty of the Bush administration actions taken in the name of national security? When Howard Dean suggested the likelihood of exactly what Ridge is telling us today, Dick Cheney tut-tutted that “That just tells me Howard Dean doesn't know anything about how things operate.”

USA Today’s editors complained that Dean offered no evidence and sounded like Michael Moore. And Tucker Carlson went completely off the deep end, calling those who raised the issue “insane conspiracy nuts” in need of “psychological help, obviously.” Carlson also opined that Dean had gone “berserk” and insisted that the Kerry campaign repudiate him at once.

But regarding the solid, nonofficial, but inarguable reasons not to trust “official” Bush sources way back when, it’s not as if respectable, nonbloggy, nonacademic, non-“activist” sources had not already demonstrated the degree to which Bush & Co. were willing—even eager—to stretch the truth in pursuit of their ideologically driven policies.

To take just one for instance, Ron Suskind’s reporting had already shown the lengths to which the administration was willing to go to try to prove its false assertions of an Iraqi connection to Al Qaeda and 9/11. He reported, for instance, that CIA officials had threatened to kill Khalid Sheikh Mohammed's children—which turns out to be perhaps the most shocking disclosure from the CIA inspector general's report—and this appeared in his book in considerable detail.

Given that the book was number two on the New York Times bestseller list (edged out, Suskind observes, only by Marley and Me), and that he described this and incidents like it on “The Today Show,” NPR, and other places, if mainstream media journalists did not report it, it was only because they purposely chose to ignore it, based on blanket administration denials. That is where relying on only official sources can get you and it is, alas, nowhere near the truth. And while Suskind was among the best, he was hardly alone. Shelves groaned by late 2004 with well-researched exposes of the Bush administration.

Another issue raised by the Ridge/Ambinder matter is that of expertise. Despite their apparent invisibility to most of the mainstream media—except for the purposes of insult and derision—there was no shortage of people who recognized both the dishonesty and incompetence of the Bush administration back in 2002-03 when the war was being sold and who realized that the task would be much tougher than anyone in power was allowing, even in the unlikely event that what they were saying turned out to be true. Instead, punditocracy debate was dominated by those who swallowed the administration line, together with hook and sinker. Here are a just few golden oldies:

William Kristol:

“I think Iraq is, actually, the big unspoken elephant in the room today,” Kristol said on National Public Radio's “All Things Considered” the day after the attacks. “There's a fair amount of evidence that Iraq had very close associations with Osama bin Laden in the past.”

“There's been a certain amount of pop sociology in America … that the Shia can't get along with the Sunni and the Shia in Iraq just want to establish some kind of Islamic fundamentalist regime. There's almost no evidence of that at all,” he reassured NPR listeners in April 2003. “Iraq's always been very secular.”

Victor Davis Hanson:

“In the same way as the death of Hitler ended the Nazi Party and the ruin of the Third Reich finished the advance of fascist power in Europe,” he predicted in 2002, “so the defeat of Saddam Hussein and the Iraqi dictatorship will erode both clandestine support for terrorism and murderous tyranny well beyond Iraq.”

Christopher Hitchens:

“I can only hint at how much I despise a Left that thinks of Osama bin Laden as a slightly misguided anti-imperialist.”

Thomas Friedman:

“So I am for invading Iraq only if we think that doing so can bring about regime change and democratization. Because what the Arab world desperately needs is a model that works, a progressive Arab regime that by its sheer existence would create pressure and inspiration for gradual democratization and modernization around the region.”

What is worth pondering is the fact that not only has there been no diminution in the respect and admiration these folks appear to have garnered from mainstream media journalists—Kristol has been hired by Time, The New York Times, and The Washington Post to spout off opinions like those—but there hasn’t been any correlative rise in the relative reputations of those who happened to be right. And lest we forget, this was the single most important—and ultimately damaging—decision that has faced this country’s leadership since Vietnam.

So perhaps it’s time that mainstream media commentators stopped treating those who were right not only about the war but the entire Bush administration as a kind of stopped clock who just get lucky every once in a while and deal with the analysis they present. It’s not as if this country can afford many more such catastrophes as the one to which the geniuses marched so blindly and yet so enthusiastically.

P.S: And let's remember another one of those brave voices who tried to warn us against the folly of the war we were being sold: Edward M. Kennedy. Kennedy, we are reminded by our friends at Thinkprogress.org, called his vote against authorizing the invasion "the best vote I've made in my 44 years in the U.S. Senate." We could not agree more.

August 26, 2009

(1) The fact that we are not really bothered any more by taking helpless detainees in our custody and (a) threatening to blow their brains out, torture them with drills, rape their mothers, and murder their children; (b) choking them until they pass out; (c) pouring water down their throats to drown them; (d) hanging them by their arms until their shoulders are dislocated; (e) blowing smoke in their face until they vomit; (f) putting them in diapers, dousing them with cold water, and leaving them on a concrete floor to induce hypothermia; and (g) beating them with the butt of a rifle — all things that we have always condemend as “torture” and which our laws explicitly criminalize as felonies (”torture means. . . the threat of imminent death; or the threat that another person will imminently be subjected to death, severe physical pain or suffering . . .”) — reveals better than all the words in the world could how degraded, barbaric and depraved a society becomes when it lifts the taboo on torturing captives.

This is your government in action, Americans. This is some of what it does with your tax dollars. ”It’s bullshit. It’s disgraceful. You wonder which side they’re on.” That’s what Rep. Peter King (R-NY) said not of the men and women in the secret police responsible for these crimes, but of the Attorney General’s move to investigate them. Amazing. That so many Americans are so ready to rally around the most vile, most obviously illegitimate arm of the American state is evidence for the proposition that patriotism is a tool for rendering a people ready to torture and kill at the state’s behest, or to tolerate it. I am disgusted that people who pretend to care about liberty are not disgusted.

Rep. King said that we (who exactly? The American people, the CIA?) must ”do whatever we have to do,” must pursue a “scorched earth policy” on behalf of the secret police and their unchecked discretion to torture those in its custody. Do we have to wait for the scorched earth before calling this thing for the terrorists?

Reference Section

From Brad DeLong

J. Bradford DeLong, Professor of Economics at U.C Berkeley, a Research Associate of the NBER, a Visiting Scholar at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, and Chair of Berkeley's Political Economy major.

The Eighteen-Year-Old is going to college next year, which means that I need to think about making more money. (The idea that one might write checks to rather than receive checks from universities is now strange to me.) So I have signed up with the Leigh Speakers' Bureau which also handles, among many others: Chris Anderson; Suzanne Berger; Michael Boskin; Kenneth Courtis; Clive Crook; Bill Emmott; Robert H. Frank; William Goetzmann; Douglas J. Holtz-Eakin; Paul Krugman; Bill McKibben; Paul Romer; Jeffrey Sachs; Robert Shiller;James Surowiecki; Martin Wolf; Adrian Wooldridge.

About Brad DeLong

Leigh Speakers' Bureau

The Eighteen-Year-Old is going to college, which means that I need to think about making more money. (The idea that one might write checks to rather than receive checks from universities still seems very strange to me.) So I have signed up with the Leigh Speakers' Bureau which also handles, among many others: Chris Anderson; Suzanne Berger; Michael Boskin; Kenneth Courtis; Clive Crook; Bill Emmott; Robert H. Frank; William Goetzmann; Douglas J. Holtz-Eakin; Paul Krugman; Bill McKibben; Paul Romer; Jeffrey Sachs; Robert Shiller;James Surowiecki; Martin Wolf; Adrian Wooldridge.

J. Bradford DeLong is a professor of economics at the University of California at Berkeley, chair of its political economy major, a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research, a visiting scholar at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, and was in the Clinton administration a deputy assistant secretary of the U.S. Treasury.
His best work extends from business cycle dynamics through economic growth, behavioral finance, political economy, economic history, international finance to the history of economic thought and other topics.